German developers had developed a cut-down version of Chrome that doesn't send usage data back to the Google mothership.
Iron is aimed at punters who like Chrome's fast JavaScript engine but baulk at the search giant's policies for collecting usage data.
SRWare forged Iron by taking out all the features privacy-sensitive …

Alternatively...

Users could just use recent WebKit nightlies featuring Squirrelfish Extreme, which is both faster than V8 (see sunspider, or dromeao tests, it loses slightly in V8's own benchmarks, but it's very tight), and more accurate (see Acid 3 passing, and even passing the timing test now).

Mine's the yellow one with reflective bits hanging on the big red truck.

Chrome...

Depends on what you want

The failing with Chromes "incognito" mode was the possibility that usage data was still going back to Google. Not so with Iron. It means that there is now a method of browsing the web that, in theory, is private both locally and server side.

Hmm, OK, I'll bite

I've been using Chrome for a while now...

...and I've gotten used to its nippiness to the expent that using IE, Opera or FF has become a painful, frustrating experience of waiting, and waiting, and waiting...

Iron sounds interesting as well. Has anyone checked through its source code yet to make sure it won't be skimming my credit card details and sending them to somebody even less trustworthy than Google? Anyone trustworthy, I mean? Can someone vouch for them, too?

Tried it

Better just go Opera then...

"However, it's difficult to imagine that Iron will pick up much market share, and people unimpressed with the idea of handing over yet more data to the world's biggest ad broker are more likely to turn to Firefox or Opera instead..."

Am I the only one who noticed that Firefox already sends a ton of info to Google? Even if you set it to use another search provider, it by default send searck keywords to a Google url and it also prescans each url by bouncing it off a Google url for the "Malware" check.

Not a real suprise that a ton of the funding for the 'zilla foundation came from the google plex. Some of these features can't even be readily disabled through about:config, and most have dissapeared from the GUI.

Chrome Fan

I like Chrome a lot. It simply works. As for the Usage data, I guess I honestly don't care. I might look into Iron, but Chrome makes me smile. now just leave it alone and dont add any damn "improvements"

re: However, it's difficult to imagine that Iron will pick up much market share

I find that remark offensive and very biased against both Iron and Chrome.

Perhaps you are correct about the immediate prospects, but Chrome is in the very early stages of development - yet it already suppassed both IE and Firefox in speed and stability, If Google stick with the current Chrome philosophy but add the features such as a Plugin API...

Paris, because like Chrome, she doesn't have much up top, but shes tight and knows how to move.

Who needs more spyware

Who needs more spyware anyway , with Spybot reporting more than 285K variants of those pesky critters , less is best .

Interestingly on digg recently , which in an election year the cynical normal users(50% are non US based ) truly beat up those silly nonsensical dingbat republican supporters who post their brain dead political comments by shooting down all the bats in their crazy version of the bellfry and more , one web test actually gave the edge to Opera . But all browsers have their plus and negative points and none are absolutely perfect although Opera 9.52 is nice with it's built in Bit Torrent Function as a bonus extra .

And in other news...

...there is a big bunch of quick browsers which don't send data home to either Google and/or M$. Honestly, in these heady days of broadband internet connectivity and (compared to the beginnings of the www) outright ridiculous processing power supply on the desktop, the speed of the browser is a pretty secondary factor of the overall experience. I mean, does it really matter whether the page takes 15 or 17 milliseconds to appear on the screen? I'd rather have a standards-compliant browser that handles HTML, XHTML and XML properly. Which, obviously, excludes M$ Internet Exploder.

My favs these days are based on webkit and Gecko, and they don't do Google by default, which last factor is the big one for me.

@Billy

Nice try, but no cigar. I do work in the SaaS arena (so to speak) and have visited the London GooglePlex on one occasion (a nice bunch, but a spookily friendly office environment. Almost too cutesy and nice...) but no, I don't work for Google.

What I do do, though, is a hell of a lot of work in browser interfaces, which means I can really appreciate differences between browser experiences. It's in that capacity that my comments were left.